History & Culture

2000 years ago Israel was no longer an independent country
Israel
  • ​​Polygamy was an established practice among the Jews at the time of the New Testament to the point that the Romans could prohibit polygamy in the whole Roman Empire except among the Jewish people. 
  • Among Jews / in the Bible polygamy was legal. ​​
  • In Israel prostitution was illegal.
  • The Bible mentions and forbids sexual perversions such as zoophilia (sexual intercourse with animals), but paedophilia was not known! 
  • Servants were common in Israel, but slavery did not exist.
  • In contrast to Roman law, "slaves" could marry (i.e. "servants" - in biblical Hebrew there is no term for "slave").
  • Thus a slave became free. If the husband did not treat her well, she could file for divorce and stayed free. 
  • We find few concrete examples of divorce in the Bible. 
  • There are several texts in the New Testament that presuppose polygamy as theologically correct. ​​
Jews sacrificed animals to their God only in the temple in Jerusalem. And since the Ten Commandments prohibited offerings before images,  diaspora Jews were the only conspicuously non-sacrificing population in the first-century empire. As a result, pagan observers sometimes accused Jews of impiety against pagan gods.
Romans
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  • Triggered by state and religious oppression by the Romans, the Great Jewish War finally led to Israel's defeat in 74 CE after approximately 8 years of fighting against the world power of that time.
  • 1.1 million Jews died and another 97,000 were enslaved. Because of the oversupply in the slave markets, prices collapsed.
  • Apart from the Jews monogamy was practiced in the Roman Empire.
  • Polygamy was illegal for Romans.
  • When in 212 CE a new law (Constitutio Antoniniana) gave the rights of Roman Citizenship to great numbers of Jews, it was found necessary to tolerate polygamy among them, even though it was against Roman law for a citizen to have more than one wife. ​
  • And when the Romans extended the prohibition to all subjects for the second time in 393 CE and compelled the Jews to relinquish this custom, they were not induced to conform.
  • Jews in Germany and in the North of France officially adopted monogamy only in the eleventh century. 
  • Prostitution was legal, commonly accepted, licensed and widespread (especially among the lower social classes).
  • Many prostitutes were slaves (and thus enriched their slaveholders).
  • Slave owners were allowed to use their (female and male) slaves (and their children) for all (including sexual) purposes, and were therefore rarely found in brothels.
  • Slaves could not get married.
  • The children of slaves were legally born slaves, even when their father was Roman.
  • Paedophilia could be practised with children of slaves.
  • Divorce was frequent.
  • Gender equality? Women (incl. Roman-born women) remained legally patronized throughout their lives, and had to obey both their husbands and their fathers. 
  • In concrete terms: Roman women could not file for divorce. They were divorced by their fathers or by their husbands.​
One week lasted not 7 but 10 days. There were no weekends (weekend is a Jewish "invention"). Festivals dedicated to various gods were the only holidays. 
Church
  • Jesus was Jewish.
  • The first Church was purely Jewish. 
  • Christians in the first century (such as the apostle Paul) still sacrificed animals in the temple in Jerusalem. 
  • The Church only began to be dominated by believers of pagan origin in the decades following the destruction of Jerusalem.
  • The followers of Christ - originally a Jewish movement - only began to be regarded as its own "religion", i.e. only partially dependent on Judaism, after the destruction of Jerusalem.
  • The Gentiles who converted to Christianity were monogamous.
  • The first ones who criticized polygamy among the Jewish people were the church fathers as of the second century after Christ. In other words, converted Gentiles who had grown up in a monogamous context themselves criticized it. 
This development from the early second century onward took its roots in an increasingly anti-Jewish environment - especially after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE - and was marked by pagan, polytheistic ideas that mixed with biblical concepts.
On the next page we will see that Jesus' teaching on divorce is inextricably linked to the issue of polygamous marriage:​
By Chris Zürcher. Page updated on 22 April 2022